Here’s a letter to the New York Post.
Editor:
Among the most dishonest practices of woke progressives is their Orwellian distortion of language. It’s dismaying that an icon of the right, Larry Kudlow, has adopted this socially corrosive tactic by describing Donald Trump as a free trader (“‘Trump is a free trader,’ prez’s former economic council chief Larry Kudlow tells ‘Pod Force One’,” September 10).
Kudlow pulls this move by re-defining free trade to exclusively mean a world without any trade barriers. Yet while such a world would indeed be one of free trade, the term has never been restricted to this utopian condition. From Adam Smith to today – to Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Phil Gramm, Deirdre McCloskey, Vernon Smith, and Douglas Irwin – true free traders have always meant by “free trade” the absence of protectionist trade barriers at home, and regardless of what other countries do.
Unlike Trump, true free traders understand that, save for narrow national-security exceptions, protectionism at home is always unjustified because, as a practical matter, it invariably worsens the economic lot of our fellow citizens. U.S. protectionism inflicts harm on Americans if other governments abuse their citizens with high tariffs no less than if other governments respect their citizens’ freedom to trade. Why, asks the true free trader, should our government artificially reduce our access to the world’s goods, services, and capital just because other governments stupidly reduce their citizens’ access to these riches? The true free trader, unlike Trump, answers: “There is absolutely no reason to do so.”
Trump and Kudlow surely know that – governments and special-interest groups being what they are – there will never come a time when all governments eliminate all protectionist barriers. To define free trade as this impossible condition conveniently allows protectionists who are embarrassed to be honestly described as “protectionists” nevertheless to masquerade as free traders as they peddle their protectionist fallacies.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
